This poem was written by the cohort for the DVAN Residency 2025 in Việt Nam.
The residency’s cohort were: Alexandra Huynh, H’Abigail Mlo, Kathy Nguyễn, Nguyễn Bích Lan, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Nguyễn Hiền Trang, and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud.
***
With you, I find joy again.
I hear your voice–
a daughter’s pain
a mother’s love.
_____Listen,
Việt Nam is a love song.
In my Vietnam1
the slow drip of cà phê
makes a deadlock of time.
You left Việt Nam when you were just three
and you,
you walked your first step on the motherland as an adult,
clumsy and curious to discover a dozen different soups of Việt Nam.
Have you ever tried soup with green jackfruit?
Ah, it is my first time and it tastes so good!
When the cook appeared you clapped your hands.
Born to Lạc Long Quân Dragon Lord and Âu Cơ Fairy
we were scattered around the globe
only to return home today.
Shoulder to shoulder we stand
under a branch of a Bodhi tree
laden with Master Thích Nhất Hạnh’s calligraphy.
In our motherland my
sisters hold me up.
Vietnamese is the language of grief
emotions roiling like waves
in a turbulent sea
Debris scattered on the battered shore
_____after the storm.
Strange fruit, UXOs, dog shit
a light bulb.
While people were talking about traffic jams,
sales strategy and Tết bonuses
we were here talking about poems
and about the poets we read
from Shakespeare to Phạm Công Thiện
from Byron to Trịnh Công Sơn.
Also, we talked about the poems
we had created for ourselves
in our felicity and in our sadness.
What is homeland? And what is a poem?
Is it the analogy between moonlight
and the shadows of glory bowers under an umbrella
that makes a piece of clumsy writing poetic?
Is it the folk song
about a sixteen-string lute singing to a cactus
that makes a place home?
This land from which we come
is home.
An inspiration.
A nightmare.
A place of longing.
When I was in high school
I had to learn by heart prose
beginning with, “Patriotism is the love for the most ordinary things:
a tree in front of your house,
a small alley leading to the riverbank,
the taste of a pear in autumn…”
There is no tree in front of my house,
and the river where I ride along every day is as dark as a loop of nightmares.
But on the day when the moon was supposed to be full
the clouds mercilessly shrouded the sky
like the gown of an exiled empress once shrouding her daydreams about life
and the only sound I heard was
a man singing with the voice of an asthmatic salamander
for a karaoke marathon of eight hours.
How could I write a poem,
let alone a poem about homeland?
A black butterfly appeared next to us on our first day.
A spirit, a metaphor, a welcome.
Or simply a butterfly who happened
to be here
at the right place
at the right time.
This is spring. No pears at all.
But it is all I have.
This nightmare river. This treeless alley. This drizzling spring.
Do I love it as someone should love their homeland?
I don’t know.
But it is all I have.
I don’t even know if this is poetic enough to be written into a poem.
It might not be a poem.
But no doubt it is my home.
I will never betray my great thirst
for writing as long as I live–
it is the best way for me to give.
For some of us it has been 50 years
since our family was uprooted
while others stayed
and others realized they could not return.
Sacrifice and Wounds
passed down from mothers to daughters.
To be here together
makes me think of a chrysalid,
and of what may become of us,
of our shields and our shells
with all our empty spaces
and our faint belief
that there is, after all,
little separation
between us and that butterfly.
Missteps led me to you.
In our motherland my
sisters hold me up.
Vietnamese words well up,
weeping for all that is lost.
The faces of children
broken and beautiful.
Today in the ancient citadel of Huế
where dreams rise from the ashes of collapsed dynasties
where ink flows down from green mountain tops
fill our pens
where stories demand us to listen
stand tall
Fearless.
Our motherland
the umbilical cord
binding us.
In my Vietnam
the dogs roam unleashed,
the world their backyard.
Lizards, cicadas demand to be heard
even snails ask that you notice them.
But mind the butterflies,
fragile as land mines.
Vietnamese is the language of grief
emotions roiling like waves
in a turbulent sea
In the evening of singing
on a boat,
we stepped outside
to see a fisherman
come to the edge
of our vessel.
Meals require many hands and bellies
broth-making, an all-day affair.
Fruit from trees so abundant,
the excess feeds the earth.
“Quê nhà trong từng bước”
– “Homeland in each step”
And yet, waiting for us on our doorsteps,
homes lost to the untamable.
America in a constant rush hour,
our yesterdays too easily discarded.
Can’t we slow down?
How unappreciative we are of the past, present,
how unprepared we are for the future.
The Master’s words wrote into us
our yearning for a sisterhood we did not know
that binds Hà Nội, San Francisco, Huế, Greensboro,
Sài Gòn, Sacramento, Bishkek.
A sisterhood thicker than blood.
In my village, back to my childhood
my granddad was a farmer
carrying everything to the fields on his back
and carrying home his humble crops
but at night on his brick porch
he sat looking up at the moon and stars
reciting poems composed by someone who passed away.
And that is why I have become a poet today.
Dozens of paper lanterns
drifted past him,
though he caught the few
that had been extinguished–
lighting their flames again
with the same tenderness
I see in you, sisters.
May we always be the ones
to light each others’ dreams,
our wishes wandering
the same sea.
1 The use of Việt Nam and Vietnam is intentional throughout the poem.
Alexandra Huynh, a 21-year-old Vietnamese American poet from Sacramento, CA, was the 2020 Sacramento Youth Poet Laureate and the 5th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States in 2021. She advocates for marginalized communities using poetry, aiming to redefine her narrative outside of whiteness. Featured by NPR, NBC, CBS, PBS, and The Washington Post, she inspires youth to articulate their experiences. Her accolades include being featured in Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and joining Room to Read. In 2023, she became the Inaugural Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University Asia Center. Currently studying American and Asian American Studies at Stanford University, she merges creative writing with civic engagement.
H’Abigail (Abi) Mlo is a Jarai-Êđê writer from North Carolina and a first-year Master’s of Fine Arts student in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Montagnard American, she co-founded “Voices of the Highlands” when she was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill to meet a long-time need in the Montagnard community for connection and storytelling (Instagram: @voicesofthehighlands). She is the author of the children’s book Yă’s Backyard Jungle. Outside of writing, H’Abigail is a hobby film photographer, outdoor enthusiast, and foodie.
Nguyễn Bích Lan is a writer and translator born in Thái Bình, Việt Nam. She was forced to drop out of school at 13 due to muscular dystrophy. She has translated 60 books, including several works by Nobel prize-winning authors. She has been honored twice with the annual Literary Translations Award from the Việt Nam Writers’ Association and was awarded the 2020 Việt Nam National Book Prize for her translation of Educated. Her work has been included in the Best Short Stories Collection by Trẻ Publishing House. She is the author of the bestselling memoir Không gục Ngã (Never Give up), two short story collections, Những ngọn lửa (Flames), Sống trong chờ đợi (Living in Waiting) and the poetry collection Ru (Lullaby).
Kathy L. Nguyễn is a writer, editor and COO of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). Her short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Fringe, Women’s World, and elsewhere. She co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, and was the editor of Nhà, an award-winning diasporic arts & culture magazine. She is a recipient of the San Francisco Artist grant (2024-2025) and Artist Impact Endowment (2024-2026) from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Vashon Artist Residency (2025), and a Christina Meldrum Memorial Scholarship from the Community of Writers (2023), among others.
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of thirteen books in Vietnamese and English, most recently the global bestselling novels The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, and the forthcoming poetry book The Color of Peace. Her writing has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and has received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the International Book Award, the BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction as well as Runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She has a Ph.D in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.
Nguyễn Hiền Trang is a Vietnamese writer and translator based in Hanoi, with a diverse portfolio of nine published books, including novels, essays, and short story collections. Her most recent works are the novel Quán Bar Trong Bụng Cá Voi (2023) and the short story collection Những Khán Giả Ngồi Trong Bóng Tối (2023). Her essay collection Tại Sao Ta Yêu (2022) received Vietnam’s National Book Award in 2024, building on her 2023 recognition in the same award category for translating Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam. Hiền Trang’s poetry has also been featured in Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine (Hong Kong), and diaCritics. She frequently contributes to leading Vietnamese newspapers.
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). She is also a member of the organization’s Editorial Committee. Isabelle is a Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature and numerous academic essays. She co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora and The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. Isabelle received a BA in Cultural Anthropology and a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.
